A Perfect Man Who Kills
by Eleanor Rosier
Summary: Before Smith was an Agent, he was a man. The story of the first war with the machines, and how an ordinary businessman becomes one of the most feared programs in the Matrix.
1. Practical Darwinism

**Chapter One**

**Practical Darwinism**

Adam Smith had a life once, but he didn't like it very much. It wasn't that it was an unpleasant life. He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. He held a job with grave responsibilities and was respected in his field and out of it. He was so important that he was not asked to join the war effort; his work was considered vital for the economy. Yet he was never entirely satisfied.

He didn't know what it was that he wanted. He only knew it was something that couldn't be defined very easily. And that it wasn't God, and it certainly wasn't that trite concept, love.

But Adam Smith didn't think about existential angst the day the windows of his office shattered and the room shook above the street four floors below.

Smith was typing out an email to that nuisance Jack Johnson when it happened. He was about to press the send button when a bone-trembling rumble began. The lights began to shake and the floor swayed dangerously. Then the window in front of Smith's desk exploded. He put his hands over his head and ducked behind the computer monitor as fragments of glass bounced off his back. At first he thought that it was an earthquake. Then he looked out the window.

The sky was dark and swarming with clouds, but it had been that way for years. An immense entity moved across the horizon. Metal tentacles poured from its glittering jaws and yellow lights flickered where its eyes would have been, if it had been alive.

They had come _here_. Smith couldn't believe it. They had said the machines would never be able to penetrate this stronghold. He leaned towards the now glass-free window, gripping the wall to steady himself against the trembling floor. He could see at least two more of them picking through the streets, crushing buildings in their path. Each machine was at least twice as tall as the largest office block. The air was full of panicked screams and howling alarms. Smith looked down. The pavement below was a seething math of people. Cars were tearing along the road, blasting their horns at the crowds.

The floor was gradually ceasing to rock under his feet. Then the lights burnt out as one and the computer screen began to fade. Only a thin greyish light filtered in from the shattered window, brightened by the occasional flash of vivid red.

This was bad. He had to get out of here alive. He needed to get out the building, then out the city altogether, preferably towards higher ground. There was a splintering crash from somewhere downstairs. Soon, Smith thought distantly, fires would start to spread throughout the streets. He looked at his office door and wondered if he could risk going down the stairs. There was a smaller crash from below, followed by the sound of running feet and a searing noise that sounded like a laser. Smith turned to the window.

There was a drop of at least ten metres to the ground. Smith scanned for a fire escape, scaffolding, anything that would get him to the street without breaking his spine in the process. There was a fire escape several metres to the right of the window. He could get to it by running along the corridor and out the emergency exit. Surely he would be able to get to the exit in time. He turned to the door.

Smith heard footsteps coming along the corridor. They didn't sound like human footsteps. Without thinking, Smith hauled himself out of the window, avoiding the glass shards, and stepped onto the narrow ledge below. It was barely eight inches wide, but if he hung onto the wall with his hands he could keep his balance. Fixing his gaze straight ahead, Smith edged along sideways. He was distantly aware of the sound of his office door being kicked in as he neared the fire escape.

A small part of his mind was still contemplating the finer details of his surroundings, such as the plume of black smoke from the fire that had broken out several streets away and was spreading with unnatural rapidity, and the young woman who tripped over onto the road and was immediately run over by a fire engine, but the rest of him was mechanically forcing his hands and feet to grip the iron bars of the fire escape as he climbed down.

The moment Smith's polished shoes touched the ground, an enormous chunk of rock broke off the building and crashed to the ground right next to him, making the pavement shake. He took the hint and got away from the building as fast as possible. He pushed ruthlessly past the terrified, confused workers who fled first in one direction and then the other. He ran past the wounded, the bleeding and the dying. He barely looked at them. He had to escape the city.

Smith had walked through these streets before, many times. The other employees had let themselves be driven around in limousines, but he had enjoyed walking. Now he was glad of it. He knew the quickest route into the suburbs, and from there into the nearby hills. He tore through the streets, turning back whenever he saw fire or collapsing stone and metal. His mind was no longer processing the sound of screams.

Before he could stop himself, Smith ran right into the path of one of the metal beasts. Without hesitating, he paced on forwards and away. Something huge and burning whizzed past his shoulder, but he didn't look back. He ran so fast he tripped on the kerb and fell into the road, collapsing to his knees and scraping his palms as a passing car nearly ploughed into him. He got up and kept running.

After what seemed like several hours, and perhaps was, an exhausted Smith had reached the outer streets of the city. Finding high ground at last, Smith allowed himself to briefly pause. He realised his heart rate had almost fused, his shirt was glued to his body with sweat and he was sucking in air like he had a punctured lung. Gasping for breath, he took off his jacket and flung it down on the road.

He looked back across the city. The whole skyline was in flames now, and smoke was rising in towering flourishes to the sky. Blue flashes of laser fire zapped intermittently in the caverns of the dark streets. There were at least twenty of the tall, metal-tentacled machines crunching through the city now.

Smith realised he had become very cold. The sweat that stuck his shirt to his body had turned icy. He picked his jacket up off the street, dusted it off, put it back on and continued up the hillside. He had to get to the trees. Then he would be relatively safe. Then he could allow himself rest.

The houses around him seemed to have been recently evacuated. The garages were empty, and some of the front doors had been left open. The residents of the suburb must have run away as soon as they saw the smoke over the city.

Smith's throat felt very dry. He reflected he could simply walk into one of the houses with an open door and help himself to a glass of water. If the water supply was still working, that was. It would only take a few minutes, and he might die of dehydration if he didn't. The house he was passing looked deserted- the door and was wide open, and several belongings seemed to have been dropped in the garden in the family's haste to leave. Still, he felt uncomfortable as he stepped over the wall and crossed the lawn towards the door.

Smith walked through the open door and found himself in a deserted room. There were toys scattered over the floor and the television was still on. It on the news channel and a hysterical reporter was gabbling over footage of burning streets. An image of Adam Smith's own face flashed across the screen. The words 'Presumed Dead' scrolled under in white letters. Disturbed and vaguely annoyed, Smith switched off the set. He'd have to put the reporter right. He hoped he'd live long enough.

Smith wandered around the house until he found himself in the kitchen. There was a half-decorated cake lying on the kitchen bench, a bowl of chocolate buttons next to it. Someone had been interrupted in the act of making a circle of buttons around the cake's circumference. Smith stood and looked at the cake for a while. There was something tragic about the pathetic sight. He moved on to the sink.

Feeling somewhat uneasy about drinking from someone else's glassware, Smith nevertheless poured a glass of water and drank the whole thing in one go. Then he poured another. His breathing had gone back to normal. He looked out the window. The sky was blacker than ever. He had to get moving. He had to make it to the tree line.

But surely he could sit down for just a minute. He walked back into the living room and sat heavily on a leather couch, sipping at a third glass of water.

Smith laid his head in his hands. Soon, he would have to get up out of the couch and move on. Soon, he would make his way out of the reach of the advancing machines.

But before he could enact his plans, the exhausted Smith drifted asleep.


	2. Word Games

**Chapter Two**

**Word Games**

It was luck, not skill or bravery that let him survive when the machines destroyed the proud city. He was painfully aware of that fact. Only that, or supernatural intervention let him escaping the blazing ruin. It could only be chance that the Cyclopean monsters chose to capture him, not kill him, carry him for miles and take him to this strangely deserted building.

His mind wasn't processing information very well. The world flashed by in a series of disjointed images. A burning city, a desert plain. There was a building, the façade looked vaguely familiar, but his mind wasn't putting together the pieces properly. Then a view of a flight of stairs, a door covered in peeling paint. Then the door opened. They flung him through it and it slammed behind him.

Brown stood leaning on the door for what could have been hours. He could barely focus on the room around him, but he could see all too clearly the steel claws which had torn open the subway, the death-rays which had melted civilians before they could even scream, the overturned trains, the flames. The flashbacks assaulted him with a terrible clarity.

Brown let his weight rest on the locked door and listen to his heart hammer. He slowly took in the room around him. It was a small, barely furnished room. There was a single light bulb, which emitted a faint but annoying humming noise. He realised with a start that there were two other men with him. The one nearest Brown sat with his back to the wall, his arms folded across his chest and his legs sprawled across the floor. He was staring at Brown, his expression hostile but hard to read because of his face-concealing plastic shades.

Brown wondered if he should say something, but his face felt numb. He remembered he carried his own sunglasses in his jacket pocket. He pulled them out and amazingly, they weren't broken. He put them on, and even though they made the dingy room seem even darker they brought a faint comfort. They were like armour, putting a shield between him and the others. And they concealed how red his eyes were getting.

Brown raised his eyebrows in a friendly gesture, but the other man made no response other than to continue staring at him. Brown turned to the third man, who sat on top of a chest of drawers in the far corner, staring blankly into space. He was a middle-aged, broad-shouldered, square-jawed and sullen-looking. He wore a dark-grey business suit, like the other two, though he had lost his jacket and one of his shoes. He didn't seem to notice Brown.

Brown looked between the hostile man and the blank-faced man. He told himself they were probably just as traumatised as he was. Brown felt that he should speak and break the silence that hung through the room like fog, but he couldn't. He felt a wave of disorientation and nausea. He staggered over to the boarded-up window. There was a ledge beneath it. Brown meant to sit on it but somehow ended up kneeling on the floor with his face resting on the ledge. He couldn't quite pull himself up. For a moment, he thought he would fall asleep, or perhaps wake up. But he was both sickly awake and paralytically exhausted. He began to cry. He didn't care if the other two men heard him. The world had just ended. You were allowed to cry if the world ended.

Brown never knew exactly how long he stayed slouched like that, letting the terrible flashbacks burn through his mind. It may have been half an afternoon. It may have only been ten minutes. Brown had lost his watch, so he didn't know. But eventually, he was wrenched out of his trance by a crash at the door. He lifted his head hazily and saw two octopus-faced machines carrying an unconscious man between them. They placed him down in the centre of the floor and left, locking the door behind them.

Brown stared at this inert newcomer. He wasn't moving. Maybe he was injured. Brown somehow couldn't gather the energy to get up and help him, or even to stand and get a better look. He thought he should really try and help the newcomer, and lay, convincing himself to get up. Before he could reach a decision, however, the man regained consciousness and pulled himself to his feet.

The stranger was very tall, and he looked wary as he looked around the room, almost calculating. He stared at the three of them in turn, turning to Brown last. His eyes were blue, and under his piercing stare Brown suddenly wanted to sit up properly, and straighten his tie. He felt suddenly self-conscious about the tear-stains on his face.

The stranger looked at Brown inscrutably and then turned away to address the other two.

"Where are we?" he asked. It was the first human voice Brown had heard for hours. "Why are we here?" There was something unhurried about his voice, but it had an energising effect on the whole room. Brown sat up on the window-bench. He didn't know the answer to either question, so he waited for one of the other two to answer.

The surly man who had been sprawled against the wall stood up slowly.

"Adam Smith?"

Adam Smith, if that was indeed his name, nodded almost imperceptibly at the scowling man.

"Mr Johnson, I am very pleased to see you alive." There might have been some sarcasm in this statement, but it was hard to tell. Johnson shrugged and leaned against the wall.

"I ask again," Smith said. "Do any of you know where this place is? Or why we are here?" The broad-shouldered man on the chest-of-drawers woke up.

"We're being held prisoner," he said gruffly. "By the machines. I don't know why."

"And you are?"

"Jones. Tom Jones. I've heard all jokes."

"Tom Jones." Smith said. He made no indication he had heard the last sentence. "What do you know, Mr Jones?"

"I was captured," Jones replied. Unlike Smith, he spoke shortly, as if he didn't like the sound of his own voice. "The assault on the city… giant robots… killing everyone… I survived… hid in the rubble, fought through the streets. Thought they'd gone. They hadn't."

Smith nodded slowly, and then turned to face the door.

"It would appear that the four of us are being held prisoner here," Smith said, staring at the panelled door. "For reasons, which are for the moment, unclear. As far as we know, the machines have taken no other captives-"

"They were killing," Jones interrupted. "They've never killed civilians before. They were killing-"

"As far as we know, the machines have taken no other captives," Smith repeated, staring at Jones in distaste, as if he had never been interrupted in his life and was unaware such heresy was possible. "It seems we have been singled out."

He was silent for a few moments and Brown felt the implications of this sink in, like a rock in his stomach. Had the machines spared his life? Had he survived because he had been singled out from the screaming people? The thought was too painful to bear.

"Is this room under guard?" Smith asked, ineffectually trying the doorknob.

"You saw what brought you in here," the Johnson said sourly.

"I saw nothing until I regained consciousness, Mr Johnson,' Smith said testily. "So I did not see what brought me here."

"Well, I was conscious when they brought me in. I estimate we're being guarded by thirty octoboids," Johnson said smugly. "I wouldn't try to escape if I were you, you'll only get killed."

He didn't actually say, 'So try it, give us all a laugh', but even Brown could tell he was thinking it. Brown had only known Smith for ten minutes, but he couldn't fathom how anyone could have the nerve to speak to him like that. But Smith merely raised his eyebrows at Johnson, almost pityingly, and walked over to Brown.

Brown stood up, suddenly nervous, but Smith barely acknowledged him. He placed both him palms on the boarded-up window, frowning. Brown thought Smith was going to rip the planks off with his bare hands. But he simply said:

"This building, where is it?"

As if by magic, Brown realised he had recognised the white façade, the narrow stairs, and the huge entrance hall.

"We're in the Miskatonic University. I know we're on a very high floor, because the octoboids took me up a lot of stairs."

Brown stopped talking abruptly. Smith was staring at him. "I'm Brown," he added, rather lamely. "James Brown."

"It appears we are trapped here," Smith said, after a cursory nod at Brown. "It would be… unwise to attempt to escape. Instead, I propose we attempt to work out why we were brought here." Brown felt suddenly very cold. Why they were brought here. That meant why they hadn't been killed.

He had left his office to buy coffee when the first wave of machines had struck. He had fled with the crowds into the subway when the alarms had gone off. But the subway had been torn open by claws indifferent to concrete and steel. Brown could still remember now, though he did not want to, the immense, moving stack of metal that had blocked out the scorched sky. It had looked like it had been designed for the sole purpose of scaring the living daylights out of any human unfortunate enough to look at it. Perhaps it had.

The thing had attacked the trains first, using the laser-cannons mounted in its face to vaporise them in seconds. Brown had backed away towards the wall, covering his face, barely thinking, when a train door had flown through the air and pinned him against the wall. It didn't hurt him, but he couldn't move it. With several inches difference it would have decapitated him, but it ended up shielding him as the walls collapsed, trapping him under steel and rubble.

Brown had stayed under there for two hours and thirty-seven minutes. He knew that, because he had still had his watch at that point, and he'd watched the numbers flicker in the dark as he'd tried not to hear the sounds from outside.

"There's nothing in here," Jones said, jolting Brown out of the flashback. "Just an old train timetable and a Scrabble board." Jones and Johnson were ransacking the chest-of-drawers.

"Anyone up for a game?" Johnson asked.

"I am," Jones shot back.

"It was a joke, alright? I don't want to play Scrabble."

"We don't know what's happening outside," Brown said, looking at the brightly coloured box. His eyes were starting to hurt. "The world's gone mad. We can't just sit here playing scrabble."

"All the letters are here," said Jones, opening up the box. "There's worse ways to pass time. We're locked in here. We might never get out."

"It's better than arguing, I suppose," Johnson said. "You do know the rules, right Jones? It's been a while."

"We each take a letter, and the one with the highest gets to go first," Jones said, reaching for the letter bag. "I got a J. Can you do better than that, Johnson?"

Johnson couldn't. He got an O and was appalled. He scowled and turned to Smith. "Are you playing? Or are you above Scrabble?"

Brown was sure Smith would refuse. He thought Smith would say they were being ridiculous, and Brown was more than prepared to back him up. But Smith simply chose his own letter, without acknowledging Johnson's taunt.

"An I," he said reflectively. "You are correct, Mr Jones, in suggesting that our time might be better spent participating in an intellectual activity. But at the same time I wonder about this situation. We are trapped in a small room with nothing more than a train timetable and a Scrabble board. Forgive me if this sounds ridiculous, gentlemen, but I think someone meant us to play this game."

From anyone else it would have sounded ridiculous, but Brown thought Smith leant the words a sinister poignancy. Now he really didn't want to play.

"So, if this is a set up… should we play along?" Brown asked.

"Exactly," Smith said, his brilliant blue eyes staring straight into Brown.

"Well I think it sounds like tinfoil hat material," Johnson sneered. "The game of scrabble is a conspiracy-" his voice trailed away when he saw Smith's expression. "Are you going to take a letter or not, Brown?" And Brown, who had a few minutes ago been determined not to play, was surprised to find himself reaching into the bag. He was even more surprised when he got an A.

"I'm starting," he said.

It was comforting to sit around the chest-of-drawers (which was too low, but none of them complained) trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with the combination JAIBNEG. It took Brown's mind off the situation outside. He wished he had sat next to Smith instead of Johnson, who sat with his elbows at a wide angle and started complaining about how long Brown was taking with his turn after two minutes.

Brown couldn't think of any words which had more than four letters. He hadn't played Scrabble since he'd been a student at the Miskatonic himself, nearly ten years ago. He'd forgotten how hard the game could be. He desperately wanted to impress them all with a long and obscure word, but ended up going with BANE.

Adam Smith turned out to be very good at Scrabble. He used up all of his letters on the first turn by spelling AGENTED. Johnson was a good player too, but he didn't care about anything except how his score matched with Smith's. He frowned deeply as he wrote down the scores with a pencil stub. Jones took vast amounts of time over every turn, but his words were mediocre. But even Jones was doing better than Brown, who was embarrassingly far behind.

Brown had almost forgotten why they were here when Smith spoke during one of Jones's longer turns.

"A common factor," he said. "There must be a common factor that unites the four of us."

"There are lots of common factors," Brown said, desperate to prove he was more intelligent than his score belied. "We're all men, and we, well we look very similar, and we're all office workers, and we're all wearing suits."

"Yes," Smith said, extending the word to four or five mellifluous syllables. "However, I think that it is something more subtle that that." And Brown felt very stupid.

"Will you stop talking, please, Adam?" Johnson sneered. "I know you're in love with the sound of your own voice, but you're making _Tom Jones_ here take even longer with his turn."

"I'm ready!" Jones snapped, and put down his word.

Brown stared at his letters. He couldn't think of a single word longer than two letters he could make with them. To stall for time he decided to ask Johnson something.

"Do you and Mr Smith know each other, Mr Johnson?"

"We work in the same office," Johnson said stiffly.

"Mr Johnson used be my secretary," Smith said with a faint trace of smugness. Brown stared at his letters in increasing desperation.

"I wasn't your secretary," Johnson snarled. "I was an aide working in your office. And that was a long time ago." Smith looked at Johnson thoughtfully, and Brown thought he saw the side of Smith's mouth twitch. When Brown saw that almost-smile, he suddenly realised that he'd seen Smith before. This man was Adam Smith the economist. Brown had seen his face in the grainy picture on top of newspaper column. Brown had never read any of Smith's columns.

It suddenly occurred to Brown that he could turn LACERATE into LACERATES and build SING off it, which would take advantage of the triple word score. That would actually place him above Jones.

Unfortunately, Brown had fallen behind again when Smith won two turns later. Brown hadn't known it was possible for anyone to win a game of Scrabble that fast. Smith very politely asked Johnson to read out the final scores. When Johnson grudgingly read out Smith's astronomical score, Smith smiled for the first time since he'd entered the room. He looked almost human when he smiled.

Brown was bitterly disappointed to come last, but even worse was being forced to come back to reality. The temporary distraction was gone, and the pain returned immediately. There was rain falling outside the window, and other faint noises in the distance.

A silence settled uncomfortably across the four of them. Brown was wondering if he should say something, perhaps even suggest another game, when it was shattered. The door was unlocked and wrenched open.

Brown turned around. Two of the bipedal machines called 'Octoboids', each about seven feet tall, marched into the room. They flanked a third machine, which appeared to be a metal sphere covered in thousands of blinking red lights. It propelled itself across the room on dozens of narrow metal legs. Brown felt certain it was supremely Artificially Intelligent.

The machine fluidly moved to the centre of the room, as the four men stood apprehensively.

"Welcome, humans," the machine said in a voice that was not mechanical at all. "I am the Azathoth. You have nothing to fear for the time being. You have been selected for our purposes by a trial of fire."

Smith was standing to face the Azathoth, blocking Brown's view. Brown was almost glad- he wasn't sure he actually wanted to know what was behind all this.

"You will soon find, humans, that you are imperative to our plans," the Azathoth said in its strangely avuncular voice. "You have been observed via surveillance and judged suitable. That is fortunate, for it seems that from the initial assault, the four of you are the only survivors."

Brown lurched as the remembered the echoing chorus of screams. He waited for Smith to say something, but to his surprise it was Johnson who broke the silence.

"The only survivors?" he asked. "You mean, we're the only people in our city to have survived?"

"I'm afraid not," said the Azathoth. "The four of you are currently the only members of the human race known to be still alive."


End file.
